Love, Hate and Monsters
by Sargent Snarky
Summary: She smiles, and she is beautiful, and he hates her. [A Twisted take on Lucrecia and Vincent]


**Love, Hate and Monsters**

Summary: She smiles, and she is beautiful, and he hates her.

Disclaimer: If I owned the Final Fantasy 7 compilation, acquiring a Gold Chocobo would have been _so_ much easier and less time consuming.

A/N: This is an oneshot.

It is a very twisted take on Lucrecia, to be sure, and I'm fully aware that it isn't exactly canon, especially if you consider Dirge to be canon. However, I don't, so I think I get away with calling this only a minor AU.

Please let me know what you think!

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Story

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She smiles, and she is beautiful, and he hates her. He can do nothing else: Such perfection of body when paired with such a sordid, flawed mind demands nothing less.

Oh, her intellect is as close to perfect as it can be, but her mind is twisted. She has no sense of right and wrong, but only of convenience and pride. She doesn't cheat, because she is capable of obtaining results well enough on her own that to be so lazy as to steal another's _work_ is unthinkable. But she has no qualms with lying or 'borrowing' another's things, if it suits her purpose. She's always careful with her lies, though, because if she were caught in one, the blow to her damnable pride (she is never _wrong_, after all; she isn't allowed to _be_ wrong) would be intolerable.

She doesn't care about being liked, moreover, much less loved – she does not even fully understand the concept of love. To her, it is naught by a synonym for obsession or lust or desire. True, selfless love has never occurred to her as existing – not even in books. Then again, she has never read very much fiction.

No, hers is a mind of mechanics and chemistry, of mathematics and turning cogs – logic and reason have ever been her guiding principles. Cold, hard facts and precise and ordered equations are what hold her mind. Not another's imagined world, conveyed through text upon paper.

However, she's always had a peculiar obsession with monsters – real monsters. The demons that skulk in the forests and attack unwary travelers, or the dragons and cats and cockatrices that patrol the mountains. Most of all, though, she's always been enthralled with the _planet's_ monsters: the WEAPONS. She knows they are real, because she has seen evidence for them, and when she was shown Chaos, asleep in its prison of mako and crystal, she was as giddy as a schoolgirl asked out on her first date by her longtime crush.

Perhaps this fascination with monsters is what draws her to Hojo. He has a mind like hers: too intelligent, obsessive and exempt from the morals and ethics that guide (hold back) other, lesser mortals. He also likes monsters, though he prefers to make his own.

He delights in reducing man to a feral beast – albeit one with a keen intelligence – and regards his insane experiments on changing things with mako and Jenova and mechanical extras as works of art.

Vincent, meanwhile, is appalled. At first, simply beholding her beauty of intellect and body, he had been enamored. She had been polite and refined, pleasant company. But then, over the weeks in Nibelheim, she had shown him her true nature and shattered the delusions, and now he hates her, as much because she _had_ destroyed the illusion as because of the monster she truly is.

And yet… he loves her all the more. He can't help it. She is a Siren, a Succubus, a candlelight to which he is a lowly moth, ever drawn.

But he's had thirty years to make his hatred win out. Thirty years of being a monster of Hojo's creation, of being a monster Hojo created specifically _for_ her. Thirty years is a long time to nurse a grudge, even in slumber.

But… seeing her body in the crystals where she trapped herself, tormented by a monster she had helped Hojo to unleash…

Vincent sees her… and he knows…

She is beautiful, and… he hates her.

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End

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A/N: Thank you. Again, please let me know what you think!

I normally don't write flowy, stream of conscious sorts of things like this, and I'm curious to see how it turned out in others' opinions. Personally, I'm a bit iffy on this one, but… I really want to know your thoughts on the subject. So, I would really appreciate any and all reviews!

SPECIAL NOTE: While I appreciate knowing your opinions, it would be nice if you'd read my author's notes, specifically, "A very twisted take on Lucrecia" and "AU" BEFORE commenting on any perceived OOC-ness, because if you think about it, you'll realize that's half the point.

Thanks!

Snarky


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